27. November 2009

Another piece of software for my physics class:

#WaveSimulator (SharpWave­Simulator)

You can simulate waves with single slits, doubles slits and variable slits.
The software is released under the GPL 3.0 License . It should run on Mono if you have SDL.Net installed, this however is not tested. If you need changes or documentation to the software please contact me. The sourcecode is of course included.

30. January 2009

Both a long day and a term of school work just finished for me. Now I am just awaiting the next one.
In the meantime I’ve been reading about clickjacking on untrace.de. I had to laugh when Benni wrote that he was not able to reproduce the exploit on the Internet Explorer. I mean its rendering and ECMAScript engines are so bad that they even fail to even run beneficial code not to mention malicious ones.
I had to face so many issues while developing this site, eg. the Internet Explorer 7 is not able to handle basic margin collapsing. Still there is the good news that Microsoft is going to iron out many of their sins with the release of the Internet Explorer 8. It even looks like that the Internet Explorer 9 is going to be a browser that users could actually voluntarily use:

There is no official roadmap for IE9, but native SVG support is likely.

A new JavaScript engine is likely down the road, too. A user asked: “Almost all others browsers are now considering JavaScript compilation. Safari introduced SquirrelFish and last week SquirrelFish extreme in reaction to V8. Mozilla has also started working on ScreamingMonkey. Will IE9 have a new JavaScript engine?” The response: “We’re certainly focusing heavily on improving Javascript, in IE8 and beyond. I’d expect to see great things here in the future.” (from wired.com)

The future does not look that bad.

But to come back to the topic of clickjacking:
Basically you detect where the users mouse is and when the user is about to click you just put a invisible link under the mouse pointer.

I think that the vulnerability is amazingly simple. Since I use NoScript for several years now it won’t be a issue for me, but I see the power behind it. Redirecting websites you trust to malicious ones can be a powerful tool to exploit your wallet and identity, together with XSS and social engineering.

Another reason to use brain.exe at a daily base. The most powerful tool when it comes to security.

29. January 2009

Imagine you were just with your family, eating dinner with them, talking and having fun. Suddenly you hear screaming and chaos is upon you. You storm to the barracks to grab some armor and take your weapons. Not knowing what danger you have to face outside. You storm into the light your comrades beside you, trying to protect everything you ever worked for, you ever sweat for and you ever loved.

You fight brave, you fight hard and it is enough, but the price you payed was high.

You do not know what is happening around you, because you lost your consciousness and you have life threating injuries. Even your spine or neck is damaged.

Is that a price you want to pay to protect your home?

Well my dwarfs did pay it and this post is dedicated to honor their bravery. Thank you you little digital entities for this entertaining moment.

29. January 2009

An awesome game indeed. I have already wasted like a bazillion hours playing it. Dwarf Fortress is a text based ascii game, made by Bay12Games. I seriously did not expect to find so much gameplay under the hood of this, well lets say, aged looking game. I mean I did not have this much fun playing Crysis or Far Cry 2 nor any other game except Empires, but you cannot compare Empires to any other game anyway.

I had a hard time learning the game and still have. But with a good teacher like Drag I did pick it up rather fast. Also enormously useful for a noob like me was the Dwarf Fortress Wiki.

I can only recommend to anyone to try out this game. It’s being actively developed and is thus better then many if not most commercial games, of course not graphic wise but I can not remember when I had such a feeling of a whole world living around your fortress like in Df. I realized that immersion doesn’t come from what you see, but from what you feel.

And there are these awesome moments, marked by huge failure or success. I had the first one today. One of my dwarfs was in a strange mood, ready to build some mighty artifact, he had all the material he needed ready, the only thing missing was a turtle shell. Well no problem I had a turtle ready in my stockpile. The only problem was, that I had no idea how to get the shell out of the turtle, or the turtle out of the shell.
First I tried to force my dwarfs to eat it, but that was not marked with much success. Those pricks rather drank beer then eating turtle. Then I dumped it and left it to rot. It worked, after some time. But Unlucky me, well unlucky dwarf, the one dwarf who requested the shells. He couldn’t wait wait for the turtle to rot. He went insane and probably killed himself until now.

Maybe that is one of the things that make dwarf fortress unique and great, it always keeps driving you mad. Constant immigration into your fortress, so you have masses of unwashed dwarfs in your mighty halls that you cannot possibly manage all of them (at least I can’t yet). Or missing alcohol that drives your dwarfs in a state of absolute inert. And no seeds to brew new one. You have to somehow survive a whole year until the next caravan comes to deliver seeds that will rescue your fortress. But you will probably end up with a dead fortress, because of cross linked tantrum chains that made every single dwarf suicide.

I agree with the Dwarf Fortress Wiki: “Losing is fun”. At least in Dwarf Fortress.

Many people will be scared of all those digits, signs and letters. For people like me there are versions with a graphical tileset. I’m using the one from here. If you don’t like that one you can look into the wiki and you will find a variety of tilesets that might fit your taste. Stay tuned for more adventures from underworld.